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Global Challenges
Issue no. 16 | November 2024
Elections – What For?
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Articles for this issue
Global Challenges
Issue no. 16 | November 2024
Elections – What For?

In 2024, nearly half the world’s population, including citizens of the eight most populous nations, voted or will vote in elections. While this signals democratic engagement, many elections are run by autocratic or illiberal regimes pursuing self-serving agendas. Paradoxically thus, as elections are generalising as a practice, democracy is met with growing defiance. On closer scrutiny, however, it appears that it is not only the indicators of democracy but also those of elections that have been declining over the past decade. This dossier, produced with the Albert Hirschman Centre for Democracy, examines the essential role of elections in the construction of democracy today.

Articles for this issue

Elections – What For?

This issue of Global Challenges has been produced jointly by the Research Office and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, both based at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

Other Issues
Issue no. 2 | September 2017
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Democracy at Risk
Global Challenges
Issue no. 2 | September 2017
Democracy at Risk

While the 20th century has been characterised by the generalisation of democratisation processes, the 21st century seems to have started with the reverse trend. An authoritarian-populist nexus is threatening liberal democracy on a global scale, including in its American and European heartlands. Charismatic leaders – thriving on electoral majorities and popular referenda – methodically undermine the rule of law and constitutional safeguards in order to consolidate their own power basis. Coupling inflammatory rhetoric with modern communication technologies, they short-circuit traditional elites and refuse to abide by international norms. Agitating contemporary scourges such as insecurity, loss of identity, mass migration and corrupt elites, they put in place new laws and mechanisms to harness civil society and political opponents. In order to better understand the novelty, permanence and global reach of “illiberal democracy”, this second issue of Global Challenges proposes seven case studies (Russia, Hungary, Turkey, the Middle East, Uganda, Venezuela and the United States) complemented by a series of expert interviews, maps and infographics.

Issue no. 17 | May 2025
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Diplomacy Today
Global Challenges
Issue no. 17 | May 2025
Diplomacy Today
Post–Cold War diplomacy has been a diplomacy of globalisation, building on multilateralism and cooperation. The recent questioning of globalisation has led to the questioning of diplomacy, which seems to have been dealt the final blow by Trump’s second election as President of the United States. His vision of a hyper–diplomatic realism — transactional, disruptive, based on force and serving the sole interests of America — clashes with the project of a new diplomacy that many actors in the international community are calling for. But what is this new diplomacy? What are its strengths and challenges? In this dossier, professors and researchers from the Institute provide contrasting analyses of the opportunities that a new diplomacy could bring to trade, inclusiveness, the United Nations and International Geneva, not forgetting the impact of new media and AI.
Special Issue no. 2 | March 2023
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Urban Morphology & Violence
Global Challenges
Special Issue no. 2 | March 2023
Urban Morphology & Violence

The essays in this volume are the product of a new ‘research practicum‘ course in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. They build on the debates on ‘Urban Morphology and violence’ to reflect on the associations between cities – their political orders and disorders – and outcomes ranging from occupation and resistance to marginalisation and containment. These texts foreshadow the possibility of centring – and challenging – the urban in our understanding of contemporary conflict, violence and peace. They are a first step in opening up a research agenda for a more textured analysis of spatial, geographical and temporal dynamics within the city in relation to violence, and, therefore, the mobilisation of spatial, temporal and visual modes of analysis. The promise is to make visible the varied roles of urban morphologies – adding to the debate on cities in and as sites of conflict.